The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (12 page)

We patrolled to a house whose rooftop could serve as a good overwatch position for the battle space and employed our soft-knock tactic to enter and clear the building. A soft knock is literally where we knock on the door of a residence and ask the inhabitants to let us in. We liked to ask to make the family feel like they had a little autonomy, but in reality they didn’t really have the option to refuse. In this case, when the man of the house opened the door, our terp explained the situation, and the man welcomed us inside. The man had a wife and two kids. We entered and turned off all the lights, clearing the building on night vision. We left some Jundis to pull security inside and then headed to the roof to set up our sniper position.

Bryce made the call to use the sledgehammer we’d brought to punch a sniping hole in the three-foot wall around the roof’s perimeter. The idea was that the hammer would be quieter and draw less attention to our position than the small explosive charges we often used. It didn’t quite work out that way. When Bryce started knocking the hole, every strike sounded like someone hitting a gong. The reverberation echoed through the neighborhood in the early morning hours.
Instead of a single loud blast, we provided a brief rhythm of gong strikes that broadcast our position to any nearby muj who might have been looking for some Americans to kill.

The reality is, the muj always knew where we were anyway. We could be quiet and evasive, but we couldn’t be invisible. The city had eyes in places we couldn’t imagine. We could have tunneled into that house, and the muj would have known about it. Regardless, I didn’t like the sledgehammer making the extra noise. It was like advertising to any off-duty muj that if they didn’t have plans for the day, the game was on. Still, Bryce had his reasons for using the sledgehammer and it wasn’t my job to question his judgment.

Once the hole was made, the position provided a clear line of sight for about three hundred yards and into an alleyway on the north side of the target area where the grunts would be operating. Time to watch and wait. I put in a chaw and scanned my sector with the SAW.

“You good, Dauber?” asked Evan. He was a cowboy from Wyoming and Delta Platoon’s JTAC. He knelt to my left. An Irishman with a great sense of humor on his second deployment to Iraq, Evan exhibited the same Zen-like calm under fire that I saw in a lot of seasoned SEALs. He had a habit of calling in air strikes that delivered an awesome payload of American ordnance, and afterward, he’d nonchalantly declare, “Good hit.” He was a lot of fun to be around.

“You look like somebody farted in your canteen,” he said.

“I’m good, man,” I answered in a low voice. “Just BTFing all this extra shit around.” He chuckled and continued scanning his sector. Before the op, Adam had made sure to point out the enemy’s habit of lobbing grenades onto the rooftops where Americans operated. I tried to account for this threat by keeping my head on a swivel, scanning my periphery, and looking down the road.

As usual, the city came alive after the morning call to prayer. Dogs meandered through the streets scavenging for food. People came out of their houses, moving up and down the street, and we noticed that a
lot of them were looking in our direction. “Fucking sledgehammer,” I growled to myself.

A black four-door sedan pulled to a stop about two hundred yards out. Three men slowly exited on the side of the vehicle opposite my position. They stood there for a minute and stared up in our direction. My instincts were going crazy. I watched them through the SAW’s ACOG scope, and they looked suspicious as hell. I had the gun trained on them, ready to open fire if any one of them showed hostile intent. They stood there for fifteen minutes, and for fifteen minutes every muscle in my body—every fiber of my being—was on high alert. It felt like hours.

“What do you think, Bryce?” I said.

“Just hang tight, Dauber.”

By 8 a.m. the sun was high in the sky. We’d been on the rooftop for several hours, wading through periods of intermittent high tension and relative low alert. I was reaching into my pocket for my can of Copenhagen when I heard the snap of small arms fire whizzing over our heads, followed by the call of “Contact!” over the radio. I ducked down lower against the wall and looked to my left at Evan, who gave me an exaggerated wide-eyed look and an impish grin. Over the sound of the gunfire all around us, we heard what sounded like World War III coming from the other side of the soccer stadium. Another group of SEALs was on a rooftop there, and we assumed it was a coordinated attack.

I was thinking about those grenades when the leadership made the call to get downstairs. I gathered up the gear that I’d shed during the night and low-crawled to the doorway, mindful of my SAW and my ruck as I scraped across the rough roof. On the second floor, Bryce did a head count and we cautiously took up window positions, scanning for targets. Everybody was on the same adrenaline high and ready to send a wall of lead at the enemy.

“Anybody see anything?” Bryce asked.

“Nah, I can’t see shit,” I said.

“Nothing here,” Evan said.

The only thing more frustrating than being in a firefight with nothing to shoot at is being in your first firefight with nothing to shoot at. We had just taken fire from an enemy we couldn’t see, and now we were unable to do anything about it. It was painful.

“Hostiles moving behind the wall of the soccer stadium,” Bryce said. “Out of range,” he added with disgust.

“Roger that,” Evan said. “I’ve got eyes on them. You want me to call in a Hellfire missile?”

“Fuck yes,” Bryce said.

Evan called in the Hellfire, but we were still stuck. Our position was compromised, and we had no choice but to call for extract. A quick reaction force (QRF) of Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles arrived within thirty minutes, and we prepared to bound the few hundred meters to the vehicles Frogman-style, basically leapfrogging from covered position to covered position, the men in the rear providing constant cover. It was hot as hell, and the fact that I’d loaded down with so much extra gear just to turn around and go back to base was pissing me off even more.
Please let a motherfucker shoot at me,
I thought.
Show me a hostile threat and I’ll put him down.

We started our peel, and the first two hundred meters were uneventful. With about one hundred meters to go, we hit an intersection. I saw a flash out of the corner of my left eye.

“Contact left!” I yelled, as the gunfire came at us from somewhere down the road on our left flank. I took a knee as I returned fire, and those around me did the same. The act of aggression was cathartic as I laid down a wall of lead, shooting at the profile with the AK-47. The violent rhythm of the gun provided a sudden release of tension that was almost euphoric. I felt calm, like I was finally in control. By the time we reached the vehicles, I’d spent at least four hundred rounds. Everyone piled into the back of the Bradley waiting for us, and Bryce
got a head count. We were jam-packed like a can of sardines, sweaty and short of breath. The Bradley’s ramp began to close, and we watched the daylight disappear behind the thick armor barrier as the track roared to life and headed back toward Corregidor.

I wasn’t sure if we got the muj in the alley, but I wanted to believe we had. I thought about it for a moment—how I didn’t care who killed him, as long as he was dead.

And then I didn’t think about him anymore.

“War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.”

—Winston Churchill

M
Y WIFE, LINDSEY,
told me a story about three Vietnam veterans who came to speak to her History of Air Power class when she was studying history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For forty-five minutes, they relayed everything they could remember about being grunts in ’Nam to a lecture hall of two hundred attentive nineteen- and twenty-year-olds. “I saw some terrible things,” one of the older men recalled. “But when the sun came up and I’d see those little Vietnamese women walking through the rice paddies, their sedge hats the only things visible, just gliding through the rice . . . it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It was fucking beautiful, man.”

I didn’t have any beautiful moments like that in Ramadi.

I told Lindsey as much and she nodded and smiled sadly. Then she said, “Good.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The way he said it,” she answered, her voice breaking. “It was the saddest thing I ever heard.”

I was eating in the chow hall on Camp Ramadi when an Army medic rushed in, yelling urgently, “We need litter bearers! We’ve got vehicles coming in. Triple-stack IED. Lots of casualties.” I looked at Jonny, Guy, and the other SEALs at the table. Without a word, we dropped our forks and rushed outside. The insurgents had rigged several 155 mm artillery shells together and detonated them when a small convoy of Marines entered the blast zone. It was a massive explosion. Guy approached the medic in charge and told him Jonny and I were Special Operations medics. The medic was glad to have us there.

I had heard the IED detonations in the distance many times before, and I always thought about the death and destruction they wrought. Seeing the carnage firsthand was a completely different level of grim reality. You can push it further back in your mind until you cross the barrier between hearing or reading about the casualties and actually seeing them up close. The image of those American Marines maimed or dying at the hands of cowards filled me with rage. I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to strike back.

I would get my chance soon enough.

Charlie Med was just a quick run from the chow hall, and we booked it as fast as we could. Initially, we went to the vehicle staging area where the casualties would be delivered, but after we were identified as combat medics, we were ushered inside.

“We’re probably going to have more casualties than initially expected,” said an Army medic. He walked briskly through the hectic scene inside, indicating we should follow him. “We’re gonna need you
each to run your own bed. I can give you each three or four medics to help you out. Can you handle your own patients?”

“Roger that,” we replied.

He nodded quickly and left us at a pair of empty beds. I looked around at the scene beyond my bed, which looked like a modern-day
M*A*S*H
episode. Around me, various medical personnel scurried in preparation for the incoming casualties. Crash carts, EKG monitors, IV fluids, and solar blankets were being gathered and distributed. The medics assigned to me came and stood by, waiting for the action they were unfortunately accustomed to. They were young, but they knew what they were doing.

I felt anxiety as the casualties started coming in. The blast had burned off some of their cammies. There was so much blood.
I don’t know if I’m ready for this,
I thought, nervously eyeing the other medics. We had trained for mass-casualty scenarios at the 18D combat medic course, but it’s different in real life. I was about to attempt to stabilize a person, a uniformed American, not a goat. I hadn’t felt this level of tension on any of the ops I’d gone on. Treating someone who’s been blown up and is fighting for his life is a heavy load to carry. You know that person’s survival depends almost completely on you. They need you to make exactly the right decisions, and you have to wrestle with a flurry of thoughts and emotions while trying to stay calm and focused enough to save them. It’s difficult to convey the amount of pressure that comes with that feeling. “ABC,” I kept repeating to myself. Airway, Breathing, Circulation.

There was an atmosphere of organized chaos as beds filled around us. When I heard the announcement that all casualties were accounted for, I realized I would not have to run my own bed. I should have been relieved, but I felt frustrated by my own helplessness. I didn’t want to sit idly by. I looked over at the bed closest to me. The doc stood at its head assessing a young Marine laid out on his back. A couple of
privates worked quickly on either side of him, cutting off cammies, checking vitals, taking orders. I stepped up assertively to the doc’s side. “Sir, I’m an 18D medic,” I said quietly. “Can I be of any assistance?”

He glanced at me quickly before returning his attention to the penlight he was using to check the Marine’s pupils. “Start an IV in his right leg,” he answered.

My anxiety melted away as my hands found their purpose. I worked efficiently on the Marine, who appeared to have suffered a blast injury to the head. He wasn’t conscious. The intracranial pressure that results from such an injury meant this Marine needed to be flown out of Ramadi immediately. Even if he got to Germany, where all serious casualties were flown for treatment, I didn’t like his chances. I could tell the doc didn’t, either.

I felt a sudden surge of rage as we packaged up the young Marine and ran him out to the awaiting helo. He was blond, ashen, and groaning. I noticed his recently cut hair shaved in a fresh high-and-tight. He looked no older than eighteen or nineteen—about my youngest brother’s age. I felt the urge to curse aloud as I looked at his pupils, one constricted and the other ominously dilated. Basal skull fracture. Not good. The rotor wash of the UH-60 helo blew dust into the tent as we lifted the young man up and ran to the helo pad. A quiet calm washed over me as we passed him to the flight surgeon and crew. There was nothing more we could do for him. He was in their hands. I ducked and ran back outside the radius of the rotors. As the 60 lifted and flew off, I stood there in silence. I thought about the Marine. I wasn’t likely to ever learn his fate. As Americans, we fight together—one team, one fight. I turned around and looked out over the city, my jaw clenched. I felt like a hammer, ready to smash every muj in Ramadi.

An hour later, Jonny, Guy, and I left Charlie Med in a somber silence. I stomped heavily through the moondust back toward the chow hall, eager to return to the order of my little tent. My SAW, my M4, my Mk 11—those
things made sense to me. But a dying Marine, not even as old as I was—I couldn’t rationalize what the muj were doing with those bombs in Ramadi’s streets. I wanted a stand-up fight with the enemy so bad I could taste it.